Troubleshooting Email Importing Issues

Here are common causes to email importing issues and their fixes. For more help, use the Support link in your SAM site and be a specific as possible to help our team narrow down the cause. At times we may direct you to your email provider, as our ability to help is limited to the SAM-side.

No Emails Are Being Imported

Be sure you have correctly enabled email importing. Your IT representative and / or mail provider can help you with the setup.

The first import will happen the evening after you enable email importing, so please give SAM 24 hours to catch up with all your emails.

Emails Are Not Importing For a User

If the email importing is not importing anything for your account, please check that the user has email importing enabled and it has their latest password.

The user should go to the "Settings" page, click "My Email Importing Settings" link/button and enter their email account password in the "Password" field. Once they press Save the system will check that it can access their email account. SAM gives the technical error message returned by your server when entering IMAP/SMTP Settings. You may need to modify the email account settings to enable IMAP and change/reset your email password because of a security setting on your email provider. This is most likely the case if your email importing was working and stopped suddenly.

Email Importing Missed a Specific Email

When this occurs, check that...

The family's/person's email address is entered in SAM

Some email programs delete the message of your email server when it downloads it to your computer. (This is common if you're using POP3 to access your emails.) Login to the web interface for your email account and make sure that the emails exist there. The web interface accesses your email server directly, so it will always show you all the emails in your email account

It can take several hours for the emails to be imported by the ID or Last Name in the subject line, due to the speed limitations of text searching through so many emails.

If this does not help, use the Support link in your SAM site to alert our team. We will need to know the following to solve the issue:

The email address sent to

The email address / user sent from

The subject line

The date the email was sent / received

Sent-Items / Replies Are Not Being Imported

First, if you're using a desktop email client, like Outlook, please make sure that you are using IMAP or MAPI and not POP3 to connect to your email server. POP3 is an older protocol, and it does not have the ability needed. SAM connects to your email server, which may not have all the emails that are stored locally on computer. So, your email client (Outlook), may need to be configured to save a copy of the sent emails in a folder on your email server. This would be necessary for each user with Email Importing enabled. In Outlook, go to your Account Settings, then click on the "Sent Items" tab. Check the box for "Save sent items in the following folder on the server" and then select the Sent Items folder. (Your folder list and options may look different from the screenshot.) To Enable Save Sent Items in the Sent Items Folder in Outlook

On the Tools menu, click Options.

On the Preferences Tab, click E-mail Options.

Click to clear the "Save copies of messages in Sent Items Folder" check box

To close the dialog boxes, click OK twice.

The Email Body is Empty

If the body of the imported email is empty, then it means that the email has been deleted of your email server, or moved to a different folder. This is most likely caused by the settings in your Outlook to delete the email of the server after it has been downloaded.

We understand that there are space limitations to storing old emails on your server, but we recommend keeping your emails on the email server for at least 1 month, because a client's email address might not be entered until a later time when a user notices that their emails are not being imported.

We strongly recommend paying for the additional storage to store your emails on your email server for at least a couple of years if possible, and using IMAP or MAPI protocols, instead of POP3, to connect to your email server.

"Communication Entered By" Shows Wrong User

SAM searches through all the email addresses entered for Person records to know which Person to enter for the "Communication Entered By" field. If the "From" email isn't entered for any Person records, then SAM will default to using the Person who the email was imported from.

SAM will not retroactively change this if you enter the missing email address on the Person record afterwards, so its very important to make sure that Persons have all their additional email addresses entered in their Person record.